"Tell me lies, but let them come from a place of real truth."--Bethany Joy

Thursday, August 08, 2013

Hurray!

I love publishing success stories, don't you?

I particularly love the ones that arrive in my mailbox with some kind words for this blog, Chum Bucket, or QueryShark!

Thus it was that Christi Corbett made my day with this:

During the 13 years it took me to go from initial idea to contract I searched for all the publishing information I could find, which is why I'm a long-time follower of your blog. I sincerely appreciate you sharing your knowledge through your posts, the Chum Bucket, and QueryShark. Thanks to your feedback, I knew it was finally time to quit fiddling with the query and go for it.

I got 55 rejections before I queried Astraea Press, and then five more after I signed the contract, two more the week before it released, another on release day, and then another the day it hit #1 on the "Hot New Releases in Westerns".

16 comments:

I really like the fact that she chose to keep it her way. She believed in the stories merit and did not feel she needed to air the intimate laundry of the characters for the reader. Which was probably in keeping with the time frame of her story.

This blog post went up while I was on vacation so I didn't get a chance to properly thank everyone for their kind words.

Until now :)

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! It means the world to me to know that my path to publication story is encouraging others out there to never give up, and to stick to their beliefs for the content of their story.

And though I can kill people off like a boss in my book, I'm really a big softy and I've teared up more than once while reading through these comments. Writers are the best!

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I'm a literary agent in NYC. I specialize in crime fiction and narrative non-fiction (history and biography.) I'll be glad to receive a query letter from you; guidelines to help you decide if I'm looking for what you write are below.
There are several posts labelled "query pitfalls" and "annoy me" that may help you avoid some common mistakes when querying.